Our book today goes by a title Stevereads has already anointed as alluring: To Wake the Mangog! (I added the exclamation point that the book’s own packagers shamefully omitted) – it’s a thick volume in Marvel Comics’ ongoing “Epic Collection” series of color reprints from the archives.

This is the fourth “Epic Collection” of Thor comics, and those four inadvertently serve as a pretty good illustration of how weird this whole reprint line is. Volume One was called The God of Thunder and featured the first twenty-five issues of Thor’s appearance in Journey into Mystery; Volume Two was called A Kingdom Lost and featured a slew of utterly undistinguished 1980s issues written boringly by Mark Gruenwald and drawn boringly by Keith Pollard; and Volume Three was called War of the Pantheons, a great collection of issues from the 1990s written by Tom DeFalco and drawn lovingly by Ron Frenz in full Kirby-homage mode. And because the “Epic Collections” are supposed to be pieces in an enormous ongoing tapestry, the first Thor volume might be #1, but the second is listed as #11 and the third was #16. To Wake the Mangog is still #4, but it’s damn odd. My only hope is that it betokens Marvel’s intention to reprint not only the whole run of Thor but also the whole run of their entire back catalogue. The completeness of it would be nice, even though any collection that features Keith Pollard (or, Odin help us, Larry Leiber) can hardly call itself “epic.”

Actually, that same unevenness is a bit on display even in To Wake the Mangog! (sorry – but it’s Stan Lee at his full throttle – it needs an exclamation point!) The collection starts with the great four-issue storyline that all but defines “epic” in the Thor line, in which the titular creature, the Mangog, a being of incalculable physical power (the strength of a billion billion beings!), assaults Asgard, the home of the Norse gods. And almost missing a step (there’s a reprint issue – remember those? – of Thor’s first appearance in Journey into Mystery), the collection moves on to a somewhat disjointed story that finds Thor caught between the world-devouring Galactus and the sentient planet Ego – certainly doesn’t get much more “epic” than that (except maybe for the great two-part Doctor Strange story in which the Earth is destroyed and then reconstituted, with only the Doctor remembering it – but we’ll get to the fantastic Gene Colan Doctor Strange again in good time here at Stevereads).

He and his Asgardian allies fight Pluto, the Greek god of death, and then there’s an odd interlude-story where the super-powered artificial being called Him decides that he wants to lose his virginity to … Thor’s immortal girlfriend, the goddess Sif. Not even the febrile imagination of Stan Lee attempts to come up with an actual reason for this – he just steams ahead, having Him abduct Sif and spirit her away. It incenses Thor – actually drives him to what Lee calls “The Warrior’s Madness” (oddly, Lee avoids calling it by its actual Viking term of berserker-fury). Even though Sif herself keeps assuring Thor that Him hasn’t harmed her, that Him is just a misunderstood man-child, but it doesn’t matter: Thor is lost in rage:

Speak not to Thor of madness! Speak only of revenge! Revenge! Revenge! Revenge! Such as none who live have ever known! If Balder call me mad, so be it! Of what use is sanity, when naught but power will prevail? And in all the world – save for regal Odin – there be no power to equal mine!

Him manages to escape, and when Thor calms down, he has to face the music for succumbing to the Warrior’s Madness – and the punishment Odin imposes is equally epic: he’s to seek out Galactus again and learn the world-devourer’s origins and intentions. And what Lee serves up is intentionally off-kilter: Thor and Galactus don’t fight – they sit and talk.

But the rest of the collection falters, and not just because Kirby’s artwork is gradually growing weirder and more disassociated but because Lee’s writing is gradually growing a bit phoned-in. The volume limps to a finish with Thor fighting killer robots and mortal bad guys and only barely manages to finish up with a win by presenting some of Jack Kirby’s original pencil-layouts for some of the pages reprinted earlier.

Even so, it’s by far the best “Epic Collection” of Thor that’s appeared so far, and it brought me a couple of hours of very warm re-reading. I of course eagerly bought all these individual issues as they first appeared, parting with 12 cents each time and flipping through their pages while my beagles snored all around me, and it quite apart from enjoying the stories all over again, it was nice to be reminded of those days.